Chicken Soup for the Soul Publisher Sues 8 Tech Giants Including Apple: Illegally Using Copyrighted Books to Train AI Models

Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher recently filed a lawsuit against 8 tech giants including Apple, Google, and OpenAI in a California federal court, accusing them of illegally using copyrighted books to train AI models. Defendants include core AI companies like Meta, NVIDIA, and Anthropic.

The plaintiff claims these companies downloaded pirated books from shadow libraries such as The Pile and LibGen without permission, parsed and embedded the content into large language models (LLMs). This constitutes copyright theft aimed at accelerating generative AI commercial development. For Apple specifically, the lawsuit states its foundation models used The Pile and Books3 datasets containing bestsellers and Pulitzer Prize-winning works, yet no licensing fees were paid.

Apple was previously involved in a dispute over The Pile dataset. In 2024, it responded that the dataset was only used for open-source research and not for Apple Intelligence systems or consumer-facing features.